Undergraduates' perspectives on online education

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

With the abrupt emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, all the parties involved in higher education were caught unprepared for online education. The current study focuses on undergraduate students' ideas about the problems that have emerged during the pandemic. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected with a mixed-method research paradigm to answer the related research question. In the quantitative dimension, an online survey was applied to 154 undergraduate students at a state university in Turkey, and the results were analyzed descriptively. To collect qualitative data, a focus group interview was carried out with eight students from the same group. The quantitative analysis results revealed similar results with the recent related literature. The results revealed that, while a general satisfaction with online education resides among the participants, infrastructure problems were the major impediment in online education, and the workloads of the participants seem to have increased since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to this, qualitative data analyses revealed a significant amount of demotivation about learning among the participants since the beginning of the pandemic. The participants shared a common notion that online education could not replace face-to-face education in any way. The participants also felt that there were serious problems in the testing and assessment processes; they believed that during the pandemic minimal student work has been overprized. This finding, to an extent, contradicts with the quantitative findings of the current study.